“The reviewer can’t take notes,” I am told before turning up to a private home for the opening night of May Contain Sex Scenes. Note-taking is a clinical kind of a thing – and, as it happens, would be very out of place at this kind of event. As well as that, there’s “gentle participation”.

I’m welcomed by the show’s producer, Genevieve Fowler, and squashed into a kind of cushioned vestibule, along with nine others, mostly young women. The air of expectation is friendly as well as curious, and the green tea I’m handed is warming. 

“It has been scary and beautiful diving into a world of sex and pleasure, asking myself a lot of tough and naughty questions, so thank you for sharing this show with me,” says deviser and performer Sabrina Martin in the programme note.

And share she does. As audience, we are led from room to room, and invited to experience – as a sort of collective sexual partner – the sounds and sensations of our solo performer as she makes an imaginative foray into her sexuality, and, to some extent, ours. 

I am reminded of the similar exploration, and writings, of Anais Nin, a Paris-based writer of the 1930s and 40s, and her visits, with lover Henry Miller, to “houses of pleasure” where they witnessed scenes of sexual connection between women. These were marked, comments Nin, by a tenderness that took them beyond mere sex. 

All praise to the performer, producer, and director Bop Murdoch, plus all others involved in bringing such an event to public notice. We New Zealanders suffer still from Victorian hangovers, particularly where sex is concerned.  This performance sets up a platform for discussion, participation and greater honesty about sexual matters. 

In her essay ‘In Favour of the Sensitive Man’, Nin says: “We (women) not only have to recognise what moves, stirs, arouses us, but how to reach it, attain it.”

I’m sure the creators of May Contain Sex Scenes would agree.  

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